Spiral: Trapped in the Forever War - Softcover

Danner, Mark

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1476747776 ISBN 13: 9781476747774

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2017

Synopsis

In “a clear-eyed and shrewd examination...of how the US seems to be mired in a losing and intractable battle against global terrorism” (Publishers Weekly), Mark Danner describes a nation forever altered by President George W. Bush’s war of choice after 9/11.

The War on Terror has led to fifteen years of armed conflict, the longest war in America’s history. Al Qaeda, the organization that attacked us on 9/11, has been “decimated” (the word is Obama’s) but replaced by multiple jihadist and terror organizations, including the most notorious—ISIS.

Spiral, explains Mark Danner, is what we can call a perpetual and continuously widening war that has put the country in a “state of exception.” Bush’s promise that we have “taken the gloves off” and Obama’s inability to define an end game have had a profound effect on us even though the actual combat is fought by a tiny percentage of our citizens. In the name of security, some of our accustomed rights and freedoms are circumscribed. Guantanamo, indefinite detention, drone warfare, enhanced interrogation, torture, and warrantless wiretapping are all words that have become familiar and tolerated.

And yet the war goes badly as the Middle East drowns in civil wars and the Caliphate expands and brutalized populations flee and seek asylum in Europe. In defining the War on Terror as boundless, apocalyptic, and unceasing, Danner provides his “chilling cautionary tale of Orwellian repercussions” (Kirkus Reviews). Spiral is “a timely, valuable book” (San Francisco Chronicle) that is “an excellent resource for those who want to understand Middle East unrest and the ISIS terrorism threat without being Middle East scholars” (Library Journal).

About this title

About the Author:

Mark Danner has written about foreign affairs and American politics for three decades, covering Latin America, Haiti, the Balkans, and the Middle East. He was for many years a staff writer at The New Yorker, and contributes frequently to The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, and many other publications. He teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, and at Bard College and speaks widely about America’s role in the world. Among his books are Spiral, Stripping Bare the Body, Torture and Truth, and The Massacre at El Mozote.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Spiral INTRODUCTION

We must define the nature and scope of this struggle, or else it will define us.

—President Barack Obama, May 23, 2013

America must move off a permanent war footing.

—President Barack Obama, January 28, 2014

I came upon the half-destroyed truck atop a highway overpass outside Fallujah, the cab shot to hell, the trailer bloodstained and propped up at a crazy angle on its blown tires. On the highway below a great black burn scarred the concrete and over it a rust-red slash, the soot and blood marking the spot where, earlier that day in October 2003, the insurgents had used a cheap remote control to ignite barrels of concealed explosives just as the U.S. armored patrol rumbled by, killing one paratrooper, wounding several. Insurgents, hidden in houses nearby, followed with bursts from their AK-47s.

The Americans promptly dismounted and with their M16s and M4s began pouring lead into everything they could see, starting with the truck that happened to be passing on the highway above, eviscerating the unfortunate driver, and then fired into the houses. How many Iraqis had the troops killed and wounded? The more the better, as far as insurgent leaders were concerned. “The point is to get the Americans to fire back,” the commanding general of the 82nd Airborne told me the next day, “and hopefully the bad guys’ll get some Iraqi casualties out of that and they can publicize that.” By week’s end scores of family and close friends of those killed and wounded would join the insurgents, for honor demanded they kill Americans to wipe away family shame.

American firepower plus Iraqi deaths equals more insurgents: an axiom in the strategy of provocation. Provoke your enemy to kill civilians and thereby call to battle the sleeping population. You have no army? Use the aggression of the occupiers to help raise one of your own. In Iraq, insurgents have used that strategy to grow and prosper, recognizing the characteristic American quickness to react with overwhelming firepower as their best friend. Across continents, al Qaeda used it as well, blowing up towers in New York to create an indelible recruiting poster for the worldwide cause while provoking self-defeating responses. Lure the Americans into Afghanistan, where they’ll sink into the quagmire that had trapped their superpower rival two decades before.

Such was Osama bin Laden’s strategy. Could he have dared dream that the Americans would prove so cooperative as to invade Iraq as well? Like a celestial slot machine daily pouring forth its golden bounty, the September 11 attacks had led the administration of President George W. Bush not only to an assault on Afghanistan but, scarcely a year later, to a wonderfully telegenic invasion of a major Muslim country. To an attack by a small insurgent group that called for Muslims to rise up and throw off American oppression, the United States had responded by dispatching 150,000 Americans to oppress Muslims. Now the tiny Islamic fringe movement could point to television screens as American tanks rumbled down the streets of an Arab capital, as American soldiers rousted Muslims from their beds, threw them to the ground, placed unclean boots on their backs: as they stripped them and tortured them at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, as they had hooded them and forced them to their knees at Guantánamo.

Abu Ghraib did for the Iraqi insurgents what Guantánamo had done for al Qaeda, embodying in powerful images their arguments about who Americans were, what they did to Muslims, why they must be defeated. A dozen years later the Islamic State, malign stepchild of that insurgency, carries the argument forward with its signature image: a young American in orange kneeling in the dust in a desolate landscape, a knife held to his throat by a masked figure in black who declaims into the camera until the moment when the music rises and he brings his knife into play . . . To Western audiences the scene says barbarism, savagery, terror. To many young Muslims it says oppression, torture, hypocrisy, the orange jumpsuit calling to mind other prisoners, shackled, blindfolded, ear-muffed, kneeling under the merciless tropical sun. Contrary to the American president who insists that Guantánamo is “not who we are,” to these viewers Guantánamo is precisely who we are because it is what we have done: Imprison Muslims and hold them indefinitely without trial. Invade and occupy Muslim countries. Torture prisoners. Assassinate with drones.

. . . . .

As you read these words, the United States will have been at war for at least fourteen years, making the “war on terror” by far the longest in the country’s history. The war began the week after the attacks of September 11, 2001, when Congress passed, and President Bush signed, the Authorization for Use of Military Force. There is no telling when it might end. Though President Barack Obama has withdrawn most American troops from the shooting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and in his second term has repeatedly warned against the perils of “perpetual war,” he has shown himself no more able than his predecessor to take the country off what he criticizes as its “permanent war footing.” For all his power, in his repeated calls to end the war the president increasingly appears to be a man fighting a stronger force. He warns, he warns again. Little changes. Laocoön struggles in the coils of the serpent.

What is that stronger force? Is it terrorism or the malign political currents still churning in its wake? Since the September 11 attacks only a handful of Americans have died at the hands of Islamic terrorists—twenty-four in 2014, fewer than were killed that year by lightning—and yet the war on terror has embedded itself deeply in our psyches and in our politics. The war on terror has taken on a life of its own, nourished by the politics of fear and nourishing in its turn powerful institutions of national security. United States’ military spending, already greater than that of the next ten countries combined, nearly doubled. Its intelligence budget—so far as we know—more than doubled.

On the ground it has been a strange war, a mix of real and virtual, carried on partly in the glaring light by American warplanes and soldiers and partly in the darkness by special operators and unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones. Even as U.S. troops began to leave behind the hot wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, U.S. drones were killing thousands, some of them al Qaeda leaders but many more low-level militants in organizations that did not yet exist on September 11. This so-called third war—after Afghanistan and Iraq—has now given way to a fourth, the war on the Islamic State, which President Obama vowed in September 2014 “to degrade and ultimately destroy.” In the cause of “taking out terrorists who threaten us, while supporting partners on the front lines”—a strategy, the president insisted, that “we have successfully pursued in Yemen and Somalia for years”—the United States sent thousands of troops back to Iraq and launched thousands of air strikes in Iraq and Syria. Months later, he had to hastily withdraw American security forces from Yemen as this particular “partner on the front lines” collapsed amid sectarian warfare.

After the attacks of September 11 the United States faced a global terrorist organization with thousands of trained fighters, a network of regional affiliate groups, and an innovative program of Internet-based propaganda and recruitment. After fourteen years of war the United States finds itself facing not one such organization but two, and the second the United States itself did much to create. The Islamic State, which governs a territory the size of the United Kingdom and a population greater than that of New Zealand, is a direct descendant of al Qaeda in Iraq, which itself was born of the Iraq War, a war of choice launched by President Bush that helped unleash a historic wave of destruction, instability, and sectarian fighting that has upended the traditional American-sustained order in the Middle East. President Obama’s decision a decade later to bomb the Islamic State in order to “degrade and ultimately destroy” it has dramatically helped its recruiting, hastening a vast flow of foreign fighters into its ranks.

Also driving recruiting, as we are reminded each time we see an Islamic State prisoner kneeling in his orange jumpsuit, is the persistence of immensely damaging policies on detention and interrogation that hark back to the early days of the Bush administration. Despite President Obama’s vow to close it, Guantánamo remains open with nearly a hundred detainees, and each new terrorist attempt within the United States brings with it loud calls for the suspect to be “given a one-way ticket to Guantanamo” and subjected there to what we have learned to call, politely, “enhanced interrogation techniques.” Each new attack—and there have been several during the Obama years, from the young Nigerian who tried to blow up an airliner over Detroit to the Pakistani American who attempted to detonate a car bomb in Times Square to the couple who attacked a holiday party in San Bernardino—brings with it a revivifying of the politics of fear and a warning that the war on terror is nowhere near an ending. Even as President Obama calls for a replacement for his predecessor’s original Authorization for Use of Military Force, he has seen to it that many of what he considers his most vital national security policies, from killing by remotely piloted drone aircraft to indefinite detention of prisoners, are legally grounded in it.

Many of these policies are tactics in search of a strategy, flailing at imminent threats today at the cost of creating more terrorists tomorrow. Even as “core” al Qaeda, the original organization that attacked the United States nearly a decade and a half ago, has been “decimated”—the word is President Obama’s—it has sown successor organizations like dragon’s teeth throughout the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia. Many of these organizations have been greatly helped in their growth by American military interventions launched in the stated cause of making our country safer. The birth and growth of the Islamic State exemplifies a central theme of the war on terror: that across these fourteen and more years of war the United States through its own actions has done much to aid its enemies and has sometimes helped create them. Just as the invasion and occupation of Iraq sowed the seeds of the Islamic State, the ongoing drone wars in Yemen helped lead to the dramatic expansion of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and contributed to the collapse of the Yemeni state.

Though a vanishingly small number of Americans have died in terrorist attacks since September 11, the number of deaths from terrorism around the world has soared. According to U.S. government figures, nearly 33,000 people worldwide died from terrorism in 2014, an increase of 35 percent over the year before—and of 4,000 percent since 2002. The number of jihadist groups and jihadists went on rising, in the case of fighters fielded by the Islamic State alone to perhaps 31,000. (Unofficial estimates are much higher.) In precisely those places where the United States has concentrated its violent attention—Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Libya—the number of attacks, deaths, and terrorists rose most dramatically. In Iraq, American troops dramatically widened a Sunni-Shia rift that the Islamic State has exploited to destabilize the entire Middle East. In Yemen, the conflict has led to a bloody Saudi invasion that the United States is supporting. We have created in the war on terror a perpetual motion machine.

. . . . .

In the pages that follow I examine the persistence of the war that began so long ago and that has inscribed itself so prominently in our national life. My intent is to show how it is that terrorist attacks on a single day could have led a great power into the trap of endless war and how that war has degraded the country’s values together with its security. Some of the underlying realities are unique to the United States, notably the country’s history of adopting permanent “emergency state” procedures during the four-decade-long Cold War, which concentrated vast war-fighting powers in the president’s hands and established under his sole command enduring secret bureaucracies such as NORAD, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Agency. Still, the dynamic of terror and counterterror, of terrorist bombings and kidnappings provoking torture, indefinite detention, and other harsh responses from the state, is all too familiar. Watching this dynamic take shape, I found myself discerning traces, faint but distinct, of a distant time and place.

More than three decades ago, when I was nearing the end of my last year in college, I met a fascinating man, a newspaper editor who had worked in Argentina during the “dirty war” that was then running its bloody course. He had gained a kind of quiet celebrity for daring to publish in his English-language paper the names of the disappeared—until the generals lost patience and his children were threatened, sending him and his family into exile. Under his tutelage I came to study the dirty wars of the Southern Cone and the dynamic of terror and counterterror that drove them forward: the bombings and kidnappings carried out by guerrilla groups, the disappearances and torture employed by the state. This last category included as a major component the practice of el submarino. In the paper I wrote at the time I translated that phrase as “the submarine”—in those days, I didn’t know the expression “waterboarding,” nor would I have guessed that the United States would one day employ this torture in interrogating prisoners and would do so under color of law.

The United States of the war on terror is not the Argentina of the dirty war. The United States did not disappear and torture and murder thousands of its own citizens. Yet during the war on terror the United States has disappeared people and it has tortured them, with the explicit and official approval of its leaders. Those leaders were not military officers who had seized power in a coup d’état but civilian politicians who had been elected by American voters. Whatever the striking differences between the American war on terror and the dirty wars of four decades ago, the bitter cycle of terror and counterterror kept in creaking inertial motion by the politics of fear seems hauntingly familiar. High-ranking members of the U.S. government have ordered terrorist suspects to be kidnapped, detained indefinitely, and tortured. Far from drawing official condemnation and punishment, these practices, together with widespread warrantless surveillance and assassination using remotely controlled drone aircraft, have come to define a new kind of quiet counterterror whose end is nowhere in sight. Torture itself, though no longer officially practiced, exists in a strange legal netherworld in which the current president and attorney general denounce it as “plainly illegal” but do nothing to punish or even repudiate their predecessors who now speak proudly of having ordered it. In the fall of 2012 we heard from advisers to the Republican candidate for president that, if elected, he would reinstate “enhanced interrogation technique...

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 1476747776
• ISBN 13: 9781476747774
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288